Cinnamon is a Linux desktop which provides advanced innovative features and a traditional user experience.
The desktop layout is similar to GNOME Panel (GNOME 2); however, the underlying technology was forked from GNOME Shell (GNOME 3).
The emphasis is put on making users feel at home and providing them with an easy to use and comfortable desktop experience. As of version 2.0, Cinnamon is a complete desktop environment and not merely a frontend for GNOME like GNOME Shell and Unity.

Starting Cinnamon manually

If you prefer to start Cinnamon manually from the console, add the following line to your ~/.xinitrc file:

~/.xinitrc

exec cinnamon-session

If the Cinnamon (Software Rendering) session is required, use cinnamon-session-cinnamon2d instead of cinnamon-session.

After the exec command is placed, Cinnamon can be launched by typing startx. See xinitrc for details.

Note: Versions before Cinnamon 1.9 used the GNOME session manager. For versions of Cinnamon currently in the official repositories, use cinnamon-session instead of gnome-session-cinnamon.

Configuration

Cinnamon is quite easy to configure — a lot of the configuration that most people will want can be done graphically. Its usability can be customized with applets and extensions, and also it supports theming.

Cinnamon Settings

Simply run the following command:

$ cinnamon-settings

Each settings panel can be accessed directly with the following commands:

Bluetooth support in cinnamon-settings and the panel

A GNOME bluetooth frontend for Cinnamon Panel and Cinnamon Settings is available in the AUR under the name cinnamon-bluetoothAUR.

Installing applets/extensions

The difference between an applet and an extension is that an applet is basically an addition to a panel, whereas an extension can completely change the Cinnamon experience and can do much more than an applet.

There are quite a few packages in the AUR (AUR package search for cinnamon). The process described here is a generic installation process.

Installing applets in Cinnamon is relatively easy. First visit Cinnamon Applets to see all of the current applets.
Download the zip file for the desired applet, and extract to ~/.local/share/cinnamon/applets/ or /usr/share/cinnamon/applets.
Then run

$ cinnamon-settings applets

to bring up the graphical applets manager. If the applet does not show up, press Alt+F2 and type r and press Enter. This will restart cinnamon and likely, the new applet.

The process is analogous for extensions, with the only difference being that directories titled "applets" can be changed to "extensions".

Tips and tricks

Creating custom applets/themes

The official tutorial on creating an applet can be found here, and on creating a custom theme can be found here.

Default desktop background wallpaper path

When you add a wallpaper from a custom path in Cinnamon Settings, Cinnamon copies it to ~/.cinnamon/background. Thus, with every change of your wallpaper you would have to add your updated wallpaper again from the settings menu or copy / symlink it manually to ~/.cinnamon/background.

Show Home, Filesystem desktop icons

By default Cinnamon starts with desktop icons enabled but with no desktop icons on screen. To show desktop icons for the home folder, the filesystem, the trash, mounted volumes and network servers open Cinnamon settings and click on desktop. Enable the checkboxes of the icons you want to see on screen.

Workspaces

A workspace pager can be added to the panel. Right click the panel and choose the option 'Add applets to the panel.' Add the 'Workspace switch applet to the panel. To change its position right click on the panel and change the 'Panel edit mode' on/off switch to on. Click and drag the switcher to the desired position and turn the panel edit mode off when finished.

By default there are 2 workspaces. To add more move the mouse cursor into the top left corner to enter 'Expose mode.' Click the plus sign button on the right of the screen to add more workspaces.

Hide desktop icons

The desktop icons rendering feature is enabled in nemo by default. To disable this feature, change the setting with the following command:

$ gsettings set org.nemo.desktop show-desktop-icons false

Troubleshooting

QGtkStyle unable to detect the current theme

Installing libgnome-data solves the problem partially, and QGtkStyle will detect the current GTK+ theme. However, to set the same icon and cursor theme, users must specify them explicitly.

The icon theme for Qt apps can be configured by the following command:

Laptop lid power management settings are ignored

If your system ignores the laptop lid close action, which set in Power Management tool, you have to edit the file /etc/systemd/login.conf and uncomment/modify the following two lines:

HandleLidSwitch=ignore
LidSwitchIgnoreInhibited=no

Volume level is not saved

The volume level is not be saved after reboot. The volume will be at 0 but not muted. Installing alsa-utils will solve the problem.

Applets not working

If audio or network applets don't work the user may be required to be added to the relevant groups (audio, network):

$ gpasswd -a [user] [group]

cinnamon-settings: No module named Image

If cinnamon-settings does not start with the message that it cannot find a certain module, e.g. the Image module, it is likely that it uses outdated compiled files which refer to no longer existing file locations. In this case remove all *.pyc files in /usr/lib/cinnamon-settings and its sub-folders.